Should you delete old blog posts for SEO purposes?

[Dynata_panel_marketing]

Hey all,

When I run crawl diagnostics I get around 500 medium-priority issues. The majority of these (95%) come from issues with blog pages (duplicate titles, missing meta desc, etc.). Many of these pages are posts listing contest winners and/or generic announcements (like, "we'll be out of the office tomorrow"). I have gone through and started to fix these, but as I was doing so I had the thought: what is the point of updating pages that are completely worthless to new members (like a page listing winners in 2011, in which case I just slap a date into the title)?

My question is: Should I just bite the bullet and fix all of these or should delete the ones that are no longer relevant?

Thanks in advance,

Roman

[Lumina]

I'd recommend you do neither.

If you set them to no-index, these issues won't matter, but you won't have lost the pages and whatever value they pose. Plus, it's generally good to keep any pages that aren't of their own accord, detrimental.

However, if you'd rather not do this, I'd look more favorably on removing them than fixing each one. That's a lot of work for very little reward - most likely, at least. Really, the answer depends on how much time you have and how fixing them would weight against the benefit(s) of doing other things.

[BlueprintMarketing]

You could go back and improve the pages if you have any URLs from other sites or back links pointing to your content and you deleted that will not be good. Plus Google Will probably not like that you chop your site and half. If they are really worthless pages no index them So your crawl budget doesn't get ruined. To me removing content because there's small problems with the Page sounds about idea very bad idea.

[Dynata_panel_marketing]

Thomas,

Most of these pages have no backlinks and contain dated information. Would you still noindex vs delete the pages?

Thanks,

Roman

[BlueprintMarketing]

I would personally still noindex because  I would never recommend deleting something that I have not seen when it comes to site architecture. This way you really are not lose anything and you revert if you need to.

You may find that the lack of drops you down in ranking I doubt that will happen I really doubt it but I would not want you to delete having not seen your site.

Hopefully That helps,

Tom

[seo_plus]

for the original poster - what did you end up doing - and did it make a difference??

(and) similar question but different...

If suddenly some 90% of a 5,000 page blog is changed to have the blog pages no-indexed, will the linkjuice be now more concentrated on the remaining 10%?

in the old days, we sort-of-called this "pagerank sculpting" and the idea was to focus the linkjuce on certain pages and defocus it on other pages.

does this make a difference these days??

keep in mind that the 4,500 remaining pages are still followed, and all backlinks remain in place.

will the site start ranking better for the keywords on the 500 indexed pages?

tia!!